“And so,” he said, “in the end, what must we determine? Is it the intellect of a genius that we revere? If it were their artistry, the beauty of their mind, would we not laud it regardless of whether we’d seen their product before?
“But we don’t. Given two works of artistic majesty, otherwise weighted equally, we will give greater acclaim to the one who did it first. It doesn’t matter what you create. It matters what you create before anyone else.
“So it’s not the beauty itself we admire. It’s not the force of intellect. It’s not invention, aesthetics, or capacity itself. The greatest talent that we think a man can have?” He plucked one final string. “Seems to me that it must be nothing more than novelty.”
—Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings
As much as we write for the love of storytelling, most of us also want our writing to be popular. We try to write what people want to read, what's popular, or what speaks to the current moment. The publishing industry compounds this, publishing something people really like, and then—whether serendipitously or to cash in on a trend—they publish a bunch of other things like it.
That's not to say follow-ups are all clones. They are often very good on their own! But the sameness of a genre can wear out the audience, and eventually, a lot of readers no longer want to read stories about, for example, dystopian YA or magical schools. (More's the pity.)
We can't control the publishing industry, but we can control what we write. We can't know what will sell, but we know what people want. They want to be surprised and delighted and entertained, and the way to do that—just as Brandon Sanderson's character Wit points out above—is to give them something new.
Readers get bored when they can predict what will happen or when they feel like they've seen something before, but we love novelty.
And there's nothing in this world more novel than you.
I do think it's important to be aware of trends, and it's no good trying to avoid all the tropes (it can't be done), but the most important thing is to write something you like and to infuse it with your unique heart, voice, and experiences.
Because whether they know it or not yet, that is what readers really want.
Well said. And that Sanderson line reminds me of this one from Shakespeare: "Nothing pleaseth but rare accidents." And he was the best at putting those moments on stage and in the language itself.
ReplyDeleteThat's a great quote, and a great reminder (for myself especially!) that we can't *make* virality happen. It'll happen or not on its own.
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